The last

The last three times someone has talked to me in public, a woman I did not know initiated a conversation with me.

While it is fine, and I donโ€™t mind, if I did the exact same thing to a woman alone in public (as I was), I would be looked at much more suspiciously and might be accused of mild harassment.

I find this hypocritical and completely shitty.

I am not blaming women, as I understand the constraints under which many live under reference interactions with strange men.

Tangential

I donโ€™t understand a great deal of human behavior as I seem to have either been born sans the compulsions that produce it, or they are channeled in such different ways that they bear little similarity to their typical expression.

Tattoos I donโ€™t get. Whatโ€™s the point, and the purpose?

Misogyny is another one, and any sort of status-seeking or status-confirming. Youโ€™re either superior or youโ€™re not. Discussing it or โ€œprovingโ€ it incessantly seems to me to be status-diminishing at best to status-destroying at worst.

Most human behavior at heart seems to be about status signaling, and to the extent that I have to do it to fit in, I utterly despise it.

I think itโ€™s easier than me because I donโ€™t have the seemingly-visceral and atavistic response to being alone that most humans do, while at the same time not suffering (I hope) from the typically-accompanying psychopathology.

Iโ€™m either broken or canโ€™t be broken. I am not sure which, nor do I much care.

Knifing

Iโ€™ve carried a pocketknife nearly every day of my life since I was eight years old.

Never got into any trouble about it at school. Where and when I grew up is gone now, though; a different world.

If I could, Iโ€™d rather carry a Bowie knife like one of these on my belt, as I did nearly every summer for years when I was younger, when it was still possible.

I donโ€™t have any desire to carry a gun, but knives are so very useful, unlike a gun which is only really good for one thing. And itโ€™s so much harder to kill someone or yourself accidentally with a knife than with a gun. To kill someone with a knife, you have to mean it.

Knives are generally useful tools, unlike guns. Here are some things I did with my Bowie knife that I carried nearly continuously from age 10-15:

1) Cleaned fish.

2) Cleaned deer and birds.

3) Pried rocks up to look for bait (not the best use of a knife, but it was a cheap knife).

4) Trimmed fishing line.

6) Made my own fishing poles.

7) Shucked mussels.

8) Defense against feral dogs in my area.

9) Trimmed limbs for uses such as water rise measuring stakes (one place I lived was prone to flooding).

I am sure that I am forgetting many more. I miss my big Bowie knife. Wish it were acceptable to carry one of those beautiful ones around these days.

Libros

The book that most exceeded my expectations: The Emperorโ€™s New Mind, by Roger Penrose.

Even though its conclusions are almost certainly dead wrong, itโ€™s interesting and mind-expanding throughout. This book caused more deep thinking in me than any other.

The most disappointing book: Gรถdel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter.

An overlong, boring hodgepodge of ideas that I either learned and/or occurred to me independently by the time I was twelve. My reaction on finishing this book amounted to, โ€œThat was all? That was fucking all? 700 pages that seemed like 7,000 for that?โ€

50s

While the 1950s were far from ideal โ€“ especially for minorities and women โ€“ this makes them seem by comparison a bit better than Iโ€™d previously credited.

It now takes two and a half incomes to produce the same standard living that one income did in the 1950s.

It shows how much poorer relatively weโ€™ve all gotten in relation to our so-called betters, especially when it comes to the really important things in life such as health care, education and housing, where most of the cost increases have arisen.

Sword

I know it seems Iโ€™m on an anti-Windows 8 crusade, and in a way I am. The app store model is a threat to open computing, and the interface is just absolutely abysmal.

In a way, itโ€™s more personal than that. Windows 7 is a great OS for getting work done. Itโ€™s fast, stable, and multi-tasks like a dream. Windows are resizable and if I want to โ€“ which I very, very often do –  I can see more than one thing at a time.

I donโ€™t want to be forced in the future to use a single-tasking always-full-screen OS where I am as fucking slow as everyone else. Because I work quickly and I assimilate a lot of information at once, a real multi-tasking OS makes me so much faster than other people.

Windows 8 would Harrison Bergeron my ass right quick.

Windows 8 or any Windows 8-like OS would be the equivalent of tying two five-pound bricks to my ankles and asking me to compete in a marathon.

Uh-uh. Not. Gonna. Do it.

Window

Windows 8 is so very shitty.

One of the worst aspects of Windows 8 for power users is that the product’s very name has become a misnomer. "Windows" no longer supports multiple windows on the screen. Win8 does have an option to temporarily show a second area in a small part of the screen, but none of our test users were able to make this work. Also, the main UI restricts users to a single window, so the product ought to be renamed "Microsoft Window."

That reads like an Onion article, but alas what is written there is true.

Windows 8 isnโ€™t even good enough for me to use recreationally, much less for getting any work done.